Immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the prize-winning director of A Time for Drunken Horses travelled to Iraq to present his latest feature, the anti Saddam film Marooned in Irak, made under the most difficult of circumstances during the terror regime. The first ever Iranian director of Kurdish origin, Bahman Ghobadi is eager to bring cinema back to a state where it has been banned for decades. In Baghdad, however, he discovers that the situation after the end of the dictatorship is still difficult: not many Iraqis come to the watch the film; they are afraid of terrorist attacks.

Ghobadi is not allowed to film the occupied city's actual conditions, so he travels to the Kurdish region in the North to witness the consequences of the war on the population. He encounters innocent victims of Saddam's regime who tell him their stories. War is over is a film diary about the difficult reality of post-war Iraq reflected in a combination of realistic and surreal images. It is also a prelude to Ghobadi's award-winning feature film Turtles Can Fly. In Iraq the era of cinema has just started.

"War is Over is a timely and eye-opening film." (53rd Melbourne International Film Festival)

Since the fall of Saddam, thousands of Iranian pilgrims risk their lives every day to visit the holy shrine of Imam Hussein in Iraqi Karbala, fifty miles south of Baghdad. For the Shiites, visiting the grave of the martyr Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammed who died in the battle of Karbala in 681, it means almost as much as going to Mecca. Bahman Kiarostami (son of director Abbas) stationed a camera in the border city of Mehran, the main crossing point for the pilgrimage, to witness this historic event. Complete chaos reigns at the border as many people try to get through illegally. They hide under truck hoods or pretend to be exiled Iraqis without a passport. Others claim that they need to bury their relatives who have died in Iraq unexpectedly. Alongside the passionate Shiite devotion, a business has developed in Mehran offering the pilgrims what they might need to cross the border: truck transfers, faked papers, corruption… But the border crossing is also a deadly business. The pilgrims face the threat of mines, assassination, dehydration and starvation on the way. Bahman Kiarostami's beautiful camera does not take sides. It simply shows us this extraordinary phenomenon of faith as a part of Iranian culture and politics.

Award: Special Mention, Nantes 2004

In the mountains near the Iranian border with Azerbaijan lies the area known as Gharabagh. Ten years ago, after a ferocious land-battle for the territory lying between the black and Caspian seas, the Muslim Azerbaijani forces and the Christian Armenian troops agreed on the autonomy of the zone. Most of the Azerbaijani people were expelled and as a result a million of them have been wandering homeless and destitute, living in unbearable conditions. Some have made their homes in tents, underground caves and deserted train carriages scraping whatever living they can while the western world remains ignorant of their plight.

The director Babak Shirinsefat, himself from Iranian Azerbaijan, takes on the mantle of representative of his people. The haunting images of the life they endure are made unforgettable on screen, he explains:" Even if I lived in paradise, I could not forget Gharabagh." The borders and boundaries that his people are faced with are not merely geographical. These are the victims of an ethnic war and the arbitrary divisions of territory. The responsibility for their desperate circumstances lies with a world that has forgotten them.